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Mostly recorded by the band themselves, and mainly a mix / master job for me. I recorded live drums on about half the tracks with percussive man-machine Luca Corda from local noise legends Locean, and I think we re-tracked a couple of small vocal parts.

Couldn’t be happier with how it’s turned out. Thing sounds like it’s carved out of diamonds.

One of the things I’ve most enjoyed in the last year or so of running The Box Mobile Studio is simply getting to spend a lot of time watching my favourite bands play.

However, I’m also always engineering and producing at the time, so I’ve decided to arrange some events where I get to watch my favourite bands play with a drink in my hand and no work to do. And I’d like you – yes YOU – to join me.

There’ll be a number of these shows this year, as there are now quite a lot of acts to get through. All killer, of course; much to my bank manager’s dismay, I’ve not, to date, recorded a band I didn’t already rate highly.

Bands will be playing upstairs in the club room. Downstairs in the bar, we’ll be doing an exclusive preview playback of the upcoming Yossarians LP, and a selection of Box-recorded tracks from TME, Locean, Altar Flowers, Mountain Song, The Last Roundup and many more.

Like this:

There are lots of ways recording jobs come my way. Sometimes I pester people until they let me record them. Other times, I pester people til they tell me to go away, and I continue to pester them until they let me record them so I’ll go away.

What’s always most gratifying, though, is when someone comes to you because a previous client recommended you to them. This is the one and only thing that means you definitely didn’t suck. You can get paid and still suck. You can have stuff on release and still suck. But only if your bands aren’t saying “Oh man, that dude is a NIGHTMARE and the record sounds HORRIBLE”, only then do you Definitely Not Suck.

Anyway, Mountain Song mailed me out of the blue, saying they rehearsed in the same place as another band I do stuff with, and I’d come highly recommended and all that kind of head-swelling stuff. So I arranged to go and hear a rehearsal and do a bit of pre-production planning (which I always do for free, potential customers note).

By the second verse of the first song, I was already thinking “this is going to be easy”. There’s the recording task, which is one thing, but there’s making sure stuff is ready to record, and with this band, there was just nothing to fix. Great gear, great players, great tones on the amps, great sounding kit and the thing that all that’s worthless without; great songs, rehearsed to a point beyond perfection. As in, they didn’t just have the songs nailed, they had them so nailed, they could make them groove like a bastard.

The room itself is an acoustic horror-show, really, but I’ve done a number of sessions in there now, and I know how to work it pretty well. I did a bit of wandering around while they played working out how I was going to set up, and then I was out of there in less than an hour.

Come the day, I tracked the full band live with bass through DI and the two scratch guitars though the Pod X3 Pro. Fairly crappy fake amp tones, but I captured the DI output of the guitars in case we wanted to keep anything, and then re-tracked the guitars properly though the amps.

Went out for a coffee and left the bass DI re-amping through the bass rig, recorded using an SE Electronics R1 ribbon mic. Overdubbed the slide guitar part on Silo (actually a Pepsi can, not a slide). Four songs (apart from vocals) done and dusted in about six hours. I don’t think we went over two takes on anything.

There was some later tidy up – I ended up using a re-amped DI of one of the scratch guitars for the intro of “Brave”, and we did a day of vocal recording. But 80% of what you hear was laid down in the one day.

Mix went incredibly smoothly too. There’s a thing lots of bands don’t work enough on, which is: what does your gear actually sound like? Is your amp set up right? When you rehearse, can you even hear the other players?

The two guitar tones were already really balanced; Rob’s tone is kind of tight and modern sounding, Dan’s has a more valve-y bark to it. Nothing fancy about the recording method, just your standard SM57 at the edge of the speaker cone. They blended and separated really well according to the song arrangements as soon as I pushed the faders up. Bass was a beastly subby throb with just enough mid-range bite to bring out the notes clearly. And the drums were played with superb dynamic control; no weird popping out snare hits, no flailing cutlery-drawer clatter on the cymbals, just nothing to fix.

This can’t be overstated; if your mixer doesn’t have to burn time and energy fixing stuff, they can focus fully on enhancing. Some of this is to do with playing ability, but probably more of it is to do with just spending the odd hour thinking about it and turning the knobs on the gear.

To put it another way: if you sound terrible, I can make you sound good. If you sound good, I can make you sound great. If you sound great, I can make you sound like gods.

So yeah, technically, I’m very proud of this one. But I have to be honest; this is basically what the band sound like. So when they introduce a Grammy Award for “Not Fucking Stuff Up”, I reckon I’m in with a shot.

Like this:

Another Club Clique remix, and some of the fastest work we’ve ever done. Completely done and dusted in two sessions of about six hours each (mixing aside).

Partly, this is because it came in the middle of a flurry of work, so we were leaner and meaner than Vasquez from ‘Aliens’ that week. But also partly because it’s such a great song (as you’d expect from Erasure) and Andy Bell’s vocal performance is killer.

The Richard X-produced original had a long-ish instrumental intro, so we decided to start with the vocal. Because hey, it’s Andy Bell singing, a sound which produces instant joy. We also thought no Erasure comeback would be complete without a big stomping piano house classic, in the mould of Frankie Knuckles’ remix of ‘The Pressure’ by Sounds of Blackness.

Can’t remember most of the details now, but I know the piano is 4Front’s TruePianos, there are a bunch of z3ta+2 synth sounds, and a bit of tomfoolery with a white noise generator and Tone2’s Bifilter 2 plugin. There are orchestral timpani samples in there from somewhere too. Because you can never go too far.

I first saw Ten Mouth Electron about a year ago in Gulliver’s in Manchester, and it absolutely pinned me to the wall. Brutal, brilliant, and synapse-janglingly strange. I then spent the next few months completely failing to find out anything about them or who they were, until, when attempting to describe them to a chap I’d just met, was informed “Ah, that’s my band”.

I first realised that I really had to record them at a later gig where they played this EP’s opening track Brite Lites. For one thing, I simply could not work out how the sounds I was hearing were being summoned from a guitar, and as a guitar player, I thought getting them into a recording situation would be my best shot at figuring out how to rip it off.

Numerous tracking and overdub sessions later, I still have absolutely no idea how it’s done. We used two amps running in parallel, and I used multiple mics around the room to capture it, but what goes on between fingers and amp remains fairly opaque to me.

Basic tracking was done in the band’s rehearsal room, in a fairly chaotic session that ran til around 3am. We then did some overdubs both in the rehearsal room and in my mix room.

Coming to mix the tracks later, we realised that the cider level had been way too high on Hate Week At The Coven, so we re-tracked that at the end of a session for the Minor Characters project at Parr Street Studios. Hate Week works best wonky, I think, but there is such a thing as too much wonky.

For anyone interested n the technical stuff:

Only had the one room to work with, so we put the bass amp out in the corridor, and ran the two guitars through both channels of a Pod X3 Pro. This is the rack version, that handily lets you run two guitars through two completely seperate amp and effect chains at once. We only used the amp sims for monitoring, as we wanted to get the tone of the band’s really rather nice valve amps. I did, however, record the straight-through DI sgnal of the guitars.

So once we had the bass and drum parts down, with no spill from anywhere, we had the choice of re-tracking the guitars as overdubs, or re-amping the DI guitars. In the end, I used a blend of the two on Cut Up Technique, and exclusively the re-tracked stuff on Brite Lites.

Bass is a combination of a DI signal and the amp. Amp for all the grit, DI to add some low end pulse. If I recall correctly, the DI signal is cut off completely from about 200 hz, so it’s really just providing some thump.

Like this:

Another day, another unnerving journey into the outer fringes of literature. Spent an enjoyable session last Friday in Parr Street Studios banging toms, acting out an imaginary sacrificial ritual and listening to English Heretic intone a Lovecraftian myth of the the post-apocalyptic future. Then we went for a nice tea round the corner.

Just undertook the first day’s recording work on the Minor Characters project at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool. Myself and the band dragged our sorry selves out of bed at an hour on Sunday morning only priests should suffer. Fittingly, a truly unholy noise was made.

The acts involved have all been asked to come up with a song or piece of music inspired by a minor character from fiction. I’m going to be recording and mixing about half of it, and doing a bit of organising and helping out with the rest.

Have been doing pre-prod for a while, and demos and snippets heard so far are very exciting. Can’t say too much right now, but here’s a photo of me and John Doran doing some highly industrious work with The Lone Taxidermist. As you can see, he’s made a large pot of tea and had his head converted into a Theremin; there’s no doubting that level of commitment.